“I disagree. Regardless; at least after a war we might have been forced to confront our own stupidities. The Culture’s involvement meant that we suffered the war’s depredations while failing to benefit from its lessons. We just blamed the Culture instead. Short of our utter destruction the outcome could hardly have been worse, and sometimes I feel that even that is an unjustified exception.”
Kabe sat still for a while. Blue smoke rose from Ziller’s pipe.
Ziller had once been Gifted-from-Tacted Mahrai Ziller VIII of Wescrip. Born into a family of administrators and diplomats, he had been a musical prodigy almost from infancy, composing his first orchestral work at an age when most Chelgrian children were still learning not to eat their shoes.
He had taken the designation Gifted—two caste levels below that he had been born into—when he dropped out of college, scandalising his parents.
Despite garnering outrageous fame and fortune in his career he scandalised them still further, to the point of illness and breakdown, when he became a radical Caste Denier, entered politics as an Equalitarian and used his prestige to argue for the end of the caste system. Gradually public and political opinion began to shift; it started to look as though the long talked-about Great Change might finally happen. After an unsuccessful attempt on his life Ziller renounced his caste altogether, and so was deemed the lowest of the non-criminal low; an Invisible.
A second assassination attempt very nearly succeeded; it left him near death and in hospital for quarter of a year. It was moot whether his months out of the political scrum had made any crucial difference, but unarguably by the time he was recovered the tide had turned again, the backlash had begun and any hope of significant change appeared to have vanished for at least a generation.
Ziller’s musical output had suffered during the years of his political involvement, in quantity at least. He announced that he was quitting public life to concentrate on composition, so alienating his former liberal allies and delighting the conservatives who had been his enemies. Even so, despite great pressure he did not renounce his Invisible status—though increasingly he was treated as an honorary Given—and he never gave any sign of support for the status quo, save for that studied silence on all matters political.
His prestige and popularity increased still further; cascades of prizes, awards and honours were lavished upon him; polls proclaimed him the greatest living Chelgrian; there was talk of him becoming Ceremonial President one day.
With his celebrity and prominence at this unprecedented crescendo of acclaim, he used what was supposed to be his acceptance speech for the greatest civilian honour the Chelgrian State could bestow—at a grand and glittering ceremony in Chelise, the Chelgrian State’s capital, which would be broadcast over the whole sphere of Chelgrian space—to announce that he had never changed his views, he was and always would be a liberal and an Equalitarian, he was more proud to have worked with the people who still espoused such views than he was of his music, he had grown to loathe the forces of conservatism even more than he had in his youth, he still despised the state, the society and the people that tolerated the caste system, he was not accepting this honour, he would be returning all the others he had acquired, and he had already booked passage to leave the Chelgrian State immediately and forever, because unlike the liberal comrades he loved, respected and admired so much, he just did not have the moral strength to continue living in this vicious, hateful, intolerable regime any longer.
His speech was greeted with stunned silence. He left the stage to hisses and boos and spent the night in a Culture embassy compound with a crowd at the gates baying for his blood.
A Culture ship lifted him away the following day; he travelled extensively within the Culture over the next few years and finally made his home on Masaq’ Orbital.
Ziller had remained on Masaq’ even after the election of an Equalitarian President on Chel, seven years after he’d left. Reforms were put in place and the Invisibles and the other castes were fully enfranchised at last, but still, despite numerous requests and invitations, Ziller had not returned to his home, and had offered little in the way of explanation.
People assumed it was because the caste system would still exist. Part of the compromise which had sold the reforms to the higher castes was that titles and caste names would be retained as part of one’s legal nomenclature and a new property law would give ownership of clan lands to the immediate family of the house chief.
In return, people of all levels of society were now free to marry and procreate with whoever would have them, partnered couples would each take the caste of the highest-designated of the two, their young would inherit that caste, elected caste courts would oversee the redesignation of applying individuals, there would no longer be a law to punish people who claimed to be of a higher caste, and so, in theory, anybody could claim to be whatever they wanted to be, though a court of law would still insist on calling them as they had been born or redesignated.
It was an enormous legal and behavioural change from the old system, but it still included caste, and it did not seem to be enough for Ziller.
Then the ruling coalition on Chel had elected a Spayed as President as an effective but surprising symbol of how much had changed. The regime survived a coup attempt by some Guards officers and appeared strengthened by the experience, with power and authority seemingly being distributed even more fully and irrevocably down the ladder of original castes, yet still Ziller, arguably more popular than ever, had not returned. He claimed to be waiting to see what would happen.
Then something terrible happened, and he saw, and still did not go home, even after the Caste War, which broke out nine years after he left and was, by its own admission, largely the Culture’s fault.
Eventually Kabe said, “My own people fought the Culture once.”
“Unlike us. We fought ourselves.” Ziller looked at the Homomdan. “Did you profit from the experience?” he asked tartly.
“Yes. We lost much; many brave people and many noble ships, and we did not succeed in our initial war aims, directly, but we maintained our civilisational course, and gained in as much that we discovered that the Culture could be lived with honourably, and that it was what we had been worried it was not: another temperate dweller in the galactic house. Our two societies have since become companionable and we are occasionally allies.”
“They didn’t crush you utterly, then?”
“They didn’t try to. Nor we them. It was never that sort of war, and besides, that is neither their way nor ours. It is not really anybody’s way, these days. In any event, our dispute with the Culture was always a sideshow to the principal action, which was the conflict between our hosts and the Idirans.”
“Ah yes, the famous Twin Novae Battle,” Ziller said, sounding disparaging.
Kabe was surprised at the tone. “Is your symphony past the tinkering stage yet?”
“Pretty much.”
“You’re still pleased with it?”
“Yes. Very. There is nothing wrong with the music. However I do begin to wonder whether my enthusiasm got the better of me. Perhaps I was wrong to become so involved with our Hub Mind’s memento mori.” Ziller fidgeted with his waistcoat, then waved one hand dismissively. “Oh, take no notice. I always become a little disheartened when I’ve just finished something this size, and I will confess to a degree of nervousness at the prospect of standing up and conducting in front of the sort of numbers Hub is talking about. Plus I’m still not sure about all the extraneous stuff Hub wants to add around the music.” Ziller snorted. “I may be more of a purist than I thought.”
“I am sure it will go wonderfully well. When does Hub intend to announce the concert?”
“Very soon now,” Ziller said, sounding defensive. “It was one of the reasons I came over here. I thought I might be besieged if I stayed home.”
Kabe nodded slowly. “I am glad to be of service. And I cannot wait to hear the piece.”
“Thank you. I’m pleased with it, but I can’t help feeling complicit with Hub’s ghoulishness.”
“I wouldn’t call it ghoulish. Old soldiers are rarely so. Depressed, disturbed and morbid sometimes, but not ghoulish. That is a civilian preoccupation.”
“Hub isn’t a civilian?” Ziller asked. “Hub might be depressed and
“Masaq’ Hub has never been either depressed or disturbed to my knowledge,” Kabe said. “However, it was once the Mind of a war-adapted General Systems Vehicle and it was there at the Twin Novae Battle at the end of the war and suffered near total destruction at the hands of an Idiran battle fleet.”
